LOOP 2021: Noémie Goudal - Below The Deep South, 2021

The video shown at LOOP shows a green jungle, several photographs arranged in successive backgrounds, playing with scales and depth and causing an optical illusion. Little by little, a fire destroys and disintegrates the scenery, forming a new landscape every second. A gap thus occurs between the set, resulting from human production which decomposes, and the hallucinatory vision of the wild landscape of a primary jungle. “Below The Deep South” is inspired by recent discoveries that have been made in Antarctica. Through deep drilling, the scientist’s team was able to find a pollen fossil and the existence of a coal deposit. This discovery introduces the enigma of an immense, potentially tropical forest located in this territory. Here, the artist questions the perpetual movements of our actual landscape and particularly the evolution and transformation of a space which, over millions of years, oscillated between ice and tropics.